Back in the beginning, bitcoin was intensely attractive to people who were in the intersection of extreme libertarian ethics and cosmopolitan financial capitalism ethos.

It's a fundamentally contradictory world view, of course. You cannot have cosmopolitan financial capitalism without very strong states propping up an extremely unnatural global order. But you can understand how middle-wealthy tech people ended up there. They were self-made, annoyed with taxes, and primarily held wealth that was generated without geographic ties. This is opposed to traditional middle-wealthy folks, whose revenue streams were historically closely tied to place and/or community.

Now that the End Of History is over, the contradiction is laid bare, and the reaction has been a sort of ideological immune response triggering fever dreams that are increasingly absurd and desperate (metaverse, web3, NFTs).